Fiddlers and floating brides

摘要

What is artistic success? Marc Chagall rose from obscurity in the Jewish Pale of tsarist Russia to become a multimillionaire and global art celebrity. He was a young star wherever new art was hot: Paris in 1911-12; revolutionary Russia; early-1920s Berlin. Popular taste canonised him in old age as a founder, with Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, of French modernism. Patrons for his big public commissions included the Catholic church, the Israeli state, the Rockefellers, the Paris opera and the United Nations.rnA strong-minded mother and a succession of three attentive wives ensured him unbroken feminine care. A political naief, he left it to luck to waltz him clear of Bolshevik hard men in Soviet Russia and of anti-Semitic policemen in Vichy France. At ease under the sunshine of Provence in 1985, a painless heart attack felled him at the age of 97 after a quiet day in the studio.